KDE Plasma 6.6 is now officially live!

The KDE Plasma 6.6 desktop environment is now officially available to the public! You can now try out this version of the desktop environment to get awesome new features, as well as performance improvements and stability enhancements.

According to the KDE Plasma team, this version is like a “visual guide to the best desktop in the known universe,” because it makes your life easier without sacrificing flexibility by adding usability and accessibility features and improvements.

The top three features introduced in this version of KDE Plasma are:

• Improved on-screen keyboard: The on-screen keyboard has been renewed and enhanced to make it more useful on touch-screen devices, such as tablets.
• Spectacle Text Recognition: You can now extract text from the screenshots using the OCR technique that scans text in the screenshots and converts it to plain text.
• Plasma Setup: When an operating system is installed, the Plasma Setup wizard appears, and it lets you configure your user account, your keyboard layout, and much more.

Additionally, it introduces brand new features to make your desktop easier to use, especially when it comes to users that need accessibility features, such as color filtering (for color blindness) and strict centered mode for the magnifier.

For more information about the release, you can consult the announcement here.

KDE Plasma 6.6 gets another set of bug fixes before the final release

As KDE Plasma 6.6 gets closer to the final release, which was expected to be released on February 17th, this KDE Plasma version gets a ton of bug fixes, including some of the visual appearance that got improved this week.

KDE Plasma 6.6 now no longer shows hardware pages that are unavailable on your computer. For example, if the Thunderbolt and touch screen features are not available, you’ll no longer see their section in Settings. Below compares the System Settings page before and after the change.

This reduces clutter caused by settings sections that are inaccessible on your computer to make it easier to navigate. This makes your experience better than before, as it only shows what’s available on your computer.

Alongside this change, the KDE Plasma team have done some of the most intriguing bug fixes that were done before the final release:

• Fixed multiple significant issues on the lock screen that could be encountered with fingerprint authentication enabled: one that could break fingerprint unlocking, and another that could leave you with an “Unlock” button that did nothing when clicked. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #506567 and KDE Bugzilla #484363)
• Fixed a Plasma crash caused by applying a global theme that includes a malformed layout script. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #515385)
• Panel tooltips no longer inappropriately respect certain window placement policies on Wayland. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #514820)
• User-created global shortcuts are now always categorized as “Applications”, resolving an issue whereby apps added by choosing an executable using the file picker dialog would be inappropriately categorized as system services and couldn’t be edited or deleted. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #513565)
• Fixed two issues with recent files and folders in the Kickoff application launcher: now it shows the correct file type icons for items, and no longer sometimes shows a weird duplicate “files” section. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #496179 and KDE Bugzilla #501903)
• Spectacle now shows the correct resolution in its tooltip for rectangular region screenshots when using a fractional scale factor on a single screen. (Noah Davis, KDE Bugzilla #488034)
• The “Open With” dialog now filters its view properly when opened from a Flatpak app. (David Redondo, KDE Bugzilla #506513)
• Keyboard focus no longer gets stuck in the Search widget after its search results appear. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #506505)

On February 17th, KDE Plasma 6.6 will be officially released for everyone to try out!

KDE Plasma 6.7 tidies up the Emoji Selector!

This week, the KDE team have done some more impressive changes that will transform the way you use your Linux computer when KDE Plasma 6.7 gets released. Their latest article stated that, along with some interesting changes made to Plasma 6.7, the final release of 6.6 is already very close!

The KDE team have tidied up the Emoji Selector window so that the emoji variants are now shown in a nice little pop-up dialog box instead of being spread in the main selector window. You can now more easily select an emoji without having to scroll through all variants.

In the comparison picture above, the left side shows you the pop-up box that you’ll be presented with when you attempt to insert an emoji that contains tones. On the right side, the emoji selector window shows you all tones for one emoji in Plasma 6.6, making it harder for you to find a desired emoji.

Alongside that, KDE Plasma 6.7 also allows you to set a global keyboard shortcut to remove all recent notifications by just a single keystroke combo. This saves time, because it makes clearing all notifications effortless without having to open the notification list. Many UI improvements were also made to make your experienced more streamlined.

#KDE #KDEPlasma #KDEPlasma6 #Linux #news #Plasma #Plasma6 #Plasma67 #Tech #Technology #update

KDE Plasma gets a truckload of bug fixes this week

When it comes to KDE Plasma 6.6 updates that happened this week, the KDE team have fixed a big collection of bugs this week that spanned around 28% of all opened bugs across all supoorted versions. This is a very important step to ensure that KDE Plasma 6.6 gets released at the highest quality and with the least amount of bugs as possible when it releases this February.

This week, the following improvements were made in Plasma 6.6:

This week, the following bugs were fixed in Plasma 6.6:

Additionally, Plasma 6.5.6 has seen the following fixes:

#454 #460 #475646 #478625 #487660 #500748 #506150 #506562 #510235 #511649 #512273 #513111 #513307 #513687 #514525 #514553 #514687 #514823 #6203 #8597 #8677 #8680 #8681 #KDE #KDEPlasma #KDEPlasma6 #Linux #news #Plasma #Plasma6 #Tech #Technology #update

KDE restores the documentation site for KDE apps

KDE has just published a blog article that stated that the documentation site, which can be accessed from docs.kde.org, had an issue where the documentation generation was not working. Now, they stated that they have finished fixing the documentation generation, and the site is now working properly as of today, with almost 150 applications having their own dedicated entry for documentation, such as Amarok, Dolphin, K3b, Kate, and Okular.

The blog article stated that there were major issues with their workflow where the documentation generation and publication were done on a dedicated machine with a monolithic process. Also, since QT 6 was released, it wasn’t possible to update the process properly due to the old workflow.

The new workflow was developed to solve all the problems with the previous workflow for documentation generation, where each application generated their own documentation using Xapian. The website generation process involved fetching the generated documentation for each application and building the website, and making local documentation generation easier. Also, the Docker image, suse-qt610, was selected to support documentation generation in this Docker image with support for QT 6.10.

However, the KDE team is not done figuring out solutions to the KDE documentation generation workflow problems, such as support for non-ASCII languages, such as Arabic and CJK languages, which is considered important for internationalization. Also, the deprecated documentation is being worked on to make sure that they reflect the current status as deprecated, while several hardcoded paths to QT 6 and KDE Frameworks 6 are being dropped when QT 7 and KDE Frameworks 7, which KDE Plasma 7 will use, releases.

You can now see the KDE documentation website in its current state here:

#KDEPlasma #KDEPlasma6 #Linux #news #Plasma6 #QT #QT6 #Tech #Technology #update

Plasma 6.7 lets you switch dark mode on/off easily

Plasma 6.7 has just recently received new features and other improvements to make your desktop smoother and more stable. Plasma 6.7 is currently in development, with Plasma 6.6 having closed its doors on new features, as this blog article stated. Now, new features have emerged to Plasma 6.7, and one of those features let’s you switch dark mode on and off easily.

There is a new settings toggle that was recently added to the Brightness and Color settings in the settings panel on your taskbar. You can now enable and disable dark mode without having to open the full system settings by clicking on a switch toggle.

This saves time, as you don’t have to open the full settings application every time you want to switch between light and dark modes on your desktop. For example, if you turned Dark Mode on, the theme changes to Breeze Dark, and if you turned it off, the theme changes to Breeze. By default, the light theme is used as a default.

KDE Plasma 6.7 also gives you an option to assign a specific key to push to talk. This means that all microphones are muted until you press a key and hold it down, into which all microphones are unmuted. This means that you don’t have to mute your microphone by yourself once you finish talking; you just release the key.

#KDE #KDEPlasma #KDEPlasma6 #KDEPlasma67 #Linux #news #Plasma6 #Plasma67 #Tech #Technology #update

VailuxOS 1.6 arriva con KDE Plasma 6, un visual rinnovato e un sistema più veloce e stabile. La distro, ora basata su Debian 13, introduce un nuovo menu Start #VailuxOS #Linux #KDEPlasma6 #KDE #Debian

https://www.linuxeasy.org/vailuxos-1-6-debutta-con-kde-plasma-6-e-un-visual-completamente-rinnovato/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=jetpack_social